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Y'know, I was really expecting to have instituted some sort of Reign of Terror by this point in my life... I mean, Alexander the Great had conquered the known world and died already by this age. Must work on fine-tuning that business plan for World Conquest some more...
The Prequel's Progress: the count's up to 20,398, which sounds like the explanation for the week's LJ hiatus until I elaborate that that was all on Wednesday. It was just an unremarkable week.
The prequel has been invaded by a horde of the narrator's fellow-apprentices; their presence is entirely logical but soooo not in my original conception of this that it's causing some difficulties. For now I'm treating them as an undifferentiated mob rather like a Greek chorus, hopefully the better to contrast with the fact that the only one of them who does have a separate identity turns out to be the villain of the piece. Since the underlying theme of the book is the narrator's struggle between the paths represented by the villain's monomaniacal detatchment from reality and the distractions of his own intense-but-frustrating connection to the other individuated apprentice in the piece, this may work out, or I may have to chase the rest of the apprentices off, we'll see. At the moment, the productive session of Wednesday foundered upon the rocks of introducing apprentice #3 (who was the narrator of the completed manuscript) to the chorus at breakfast, so I've set that scene aside to work on other sections while I Contemplate. Backlog of ideas slowly beginning to drop down into the pipeline to get worked upon properly...
As to my unremarkable week, most of it can be summed up by saying that yet another apartment in the building is being ripped up by a crew of workmen who like to get an early start on the day, as in "the shrieking of tortured lathe and splintering wood at 7 AM every day this week" early, so I've been rather cranky because it's not making for a pleasant work environment. (That thousand words on Wednesday came along between 11 PM and the time their noise started back up again on Thursday.) It's finally almost nice enough to open the windows and it's way too noisy...
Sunday and Monday, however, get glossed over with "chewable Imodium is pretty damn nasty but at least I got a lot of reading done". Choosing to dwell upon the latter aspect of that statement, I'll continue with my promise/threat to say more about my own reading habits:
The Killing of Worlds, Scott Westerfeld. Having bolted down The Risen Empire the previous Thursday, I was quite pleased to find part two already waiting at my library on the Saturday. This is military/space-opera SF, not my primary genre-of-interest but Westerfeld's got a knack for intriguingly quotidian touches, such as the deceleration gel being strawberry-flavored. The nanobattle at the beginning of the first book is particularly cleverly handled. The premise rather comes off the rails towards the end, but high marks for effort. Oh, and it's got undead cats in it...
Alta, Mercedes Lackey. Whom I read more out of habit these days, since she's gone from a "I wanna be able to do that" author to a "hey, I can do better than that" author as my own tastes develop. Although I still aspire to the "...and she makes an actual living doing it too" part of it. :) Alta is part two of what's basically her retelling of Jane Yolen's retelling of McCaffrey's "oppressed kid raises dragon in secret" schtick; there's not much new to be done with the concept by now, but it's a good example of how to do a workmanlike job of storytelling, and the setting's at least cliched-faux-Egyptian instead of cliched-faux-medieval-Europe, which is a change of pace from the usual fantasy-by-the-pound standard. It would be good for a reverse-engineering sort of "what's she doing here, how is she doing it, how would you handle this differently" analysis exercise for those whose learning style that is, writing-wise.
Also went through a stack of nonfiction, which generally involves looking for specific info so it's more churn than actual in-depth reading as such, but the occasional item does stand out. For example, this week's "things found while looking for other things" books included Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, which along with fodder for the current arguments has some helpful insight on how the institution of heterosexual marriage has evolved over the centuries that happened to address some concerns that I'd been having regarding my own work. So you never do know what you're going to come across where...
Oh, and the movie I was thinking of at Tuesday's MeetUp was The Dream Team -- what was the question again...?
The Prequel's Progress: the count's up to 20,398, which sounds like the explanation for the week's LJ hiatus until I elaborate that that was all on Wednesday. It was just an unremarkable week.
The prequel has been invaded by a horde of the narrator's fellow-apprentices; their presence is entirely logical but soooo not in my original conception of this that it's causing some difficulties. For now I'm treating them as an undifferentiated mob rather like a Greek chorus, hopefully the better to contrast with the fact that the only one of them who does have a separate identity turns out to be the villain of the piece. Since the underlying theme of the book is the narrator's struggle between the paths represented by the villain's monomaniacal detatchment from reality and the distractions of his own intense-but-frustrating connection to the other individuated apprentice in the piece, this may work out, or I may have to chase the rest of the apprentices off, we'll see. At the moment, the productive session of Wednesday foundered upon the rocks of introducing apprentice #3 (who was the narrator of the completed manuscript) to the chorus at breakfast, so I've set that scene aside to work on other sections while I Contemplate. Backlog of ideas slowly beginning to drop down into the pipeline to get worked upon properly...
As to my unremarkable week, most of it can be summed up by saying that yet another apartment in the building is being ripped up by a crew of workmen who like to get an early start on the day, as in "the shrieking of tortured lathe and splintering wood at 7 AM every day this week" early, so I've been rather cranky because it's not making for a pleasant work environment. (That thousand words on Wednesday came along between 11 PM and the time their noise started back up again on Thursday.) It's finally almost nice enough to open the windows and it's way too noisy...
Sunday and Monday, however, get glossed over with "chewable Imodium is pretty damn nasty but at least I got a lot of reading done". Choosing to dwell upon the latter aspect of that statement, I'll continue with my promise/threat to say more about my own reading habits:
The Killing of Worlds, Scott Westerfeld. Having bolted down The Risen Empire the previous Thursday, I was quite pleased to find part two already waiting at my library on the Saturday. This is military/space-opera SF, not my primary genre-of-interest but Westerfeld's got a knack for intriguingly quotidian touches, such as the deceleration gel being strawberry-flavored. The nanobattle at the beginning of the first book is particularly cleverly handled. The premise rather comes off the rails towards the end, but high marks for effort. Oh, and it's got undead cats in it...
Alta, Mercedes Lackey. Whom I read more out of habit these days, since she's gone from a "I wanna be able to do that" author to a "hey, I can do better than that" author as my own tastes develop. Although I still aspire to the "...and she makes an actual living doing it too" part of it. :) Alta is part two of what's basically her retelling of Jane Yolen's retelling of McCaffrey's "oppressed kid raises dragon in secret" schtick; there's not much new to be done with the concept by now, but it's a good example of how to do a workmanlike job of storytelling, and the setting's at least cliched-faux-Egyptian instead of cliched-faux-medieval-Europe, which is a change of pace from the usual fantasy-by-the-pound standard. It would be good for a reverse-engineering sort of "what's she doing here, how is she doing it, how would you handle this differently" analysis exercise for those whose learning style that is, writing-wise.
Also went through a stack of nonfiction, which generally involves looking for specific info so it's more churn than actual in-depth reading as such, but the occasional item does stand out. For example, this week's "things found while looking for other things" books included Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, which along with fodder for the current arguments has some helpful insight on how the institution of heterosexual marriage has evolved over the centuries that happened to address some concerns that I'd been having regarding my own work. So you never do know what you're going to come across where...
Oh, and the movie I was thinking of at Tuesday's MeetUp was The Dream Team -- what was the question again...?